Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  One basic principle must be the basic rule for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else … In twenty to thirty years we must really be able to provide the whole of Europe with its ruling class.

  Heinrich Himmler, 4 October 1943

  The Romanians act against the Jews without any idea of a plan. No one would object to the numerous executions if the technical aspect of their preparation, as well as the manner in which they are carried out, were not wanting … The Einsatzkommando has urged the Romanian police to proceed with more order.

  Report by Einsatzgruppe D, 31 July 1941

  A Jew in a greasy caftan walks up to beg some bread, a couple of comrades get a hold of him and drag him behind a building and a moment later he comes to an end. There isn’t any room for Jews in the new Europe, they’ve brought too much misery to the European people.

  Danish SS volunteer

  Acknowledgements

  The very broad scope of this book was challenging. I must thank first of all Simon Young who took time out from his busy schedule to provide invaluable advice and hands on assistance with a recalcitrant manuscript. Professor Michael Burleigh, William Niven and Nigel Jones read parts of the manuscript. Judith Lanio assisted with a mass of German language documents and texts with great efficiency. Christian Barse assisted with Danish materials. A number of historians generously responded to my many questions: Marko Attilla Hoare, Milan Hauner, Clemens Heni, David Cesarani, Andrew Ezergailis, Martin Dean, Wendy Lower, Martin Conway, Saul David, Adam Sisman, Timothy Snyder and Giles MacDonough all provided expert advice. Matthew Kott offered valuable insights into the German occupation of Norway, Latvia and the Baltic. At a critical stage, Ephraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz made valuable contributions. Detlef Siebert provided vital leads. I am grateful to Julian Hendy and Ray Brandon for generously sharing their insights and hard-won information about Ukrainian nationalism and the formation of the SS Division ‘Galizien’. George Lepre and Michael Melnyk, who have written accounts of the Bosnian ‘Handschar’ and the Ukrainian ‘Galizien’ SS divisions respectively, sent unique documentary materials. From these, I have drawn my own and no doubt different conclusions.

  I spent many hours in some excellent libraries, above all the British Library and the Weiner Library in London. The National Archives in Kew was another important resource. I must also thank three German libraries: the German National Library in Leipzig, the State Library and the excellent Library of the ‘Topography of Terror’ in Berlin. I am especially indebted to the Bundesarchiv/Zentralle Stelle in Ludwigsburg. I discussed the problems of collaboration with Ojārs Ēriks Kalninš at the Latvian Institute and with historians at the Museum of the Occupation, Riga, the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum and the Central State Archives in Kiev. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact and judgement.

  I welcome corrections, comments and further research proposals through the website listed at the end of the Acknowledgements.

  I thank Pimlico Books for permission to quote from Mihail Sebastian’s Journal: 1935–1944 (2003) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to use extracts from Frida Michelson’s remarkable memoir I Survived Rumbuli (1979).

  Richard Johnson, Patrick Janson-Smith and Neil Blair backed the project at the beginning of a long haul. Simon Hamlet, Christine McMorris and Lindsey Smith at The History Press bravely took on a long manuscript. I must also thank some good friends: Laurence Peters, who read parts of the book and made valuable suggestions; Gerda Sousa; Karin Kaschner-Sousa; and David Robson, Sarah Dewis (and family), who provided varieties of nourishment and accommodation. My wife Diana Böhmer and our son Jacob put up with my periodic disappearances with fortitude: my love to them.

  www.hitlersforeignexecutioners.com

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Note on Language

  Preface: Riga, 2010

  Introduction

  Part One: September 1939–June 1941

  1 The Polish Crucible

  2 Balkan Rehearsal

  3 Night of the Vampires

  Part Two: June 1941–February 1944

  4 Horror Upon Horror

  5 Massacre in L’viv

  6 Himmler’s Shadow War

  7 The Blue Buses

  8 Western Crusaders

  9 The Führer’s Son

  10 The First Eastern SS Legions

  11 Nazi Jihad

  12 The Road to Huta Pieniacka

  Part Three: March 1944–April 1945

  13 ‘We Shall Finish Them Off’

  14 Bonfire of the Collaborators

  15 The Failure of Retribution

  Appendix 1 Maps

  Appendix 2 Foreign Divisions Recruited by the Third Reich

  Appendix 3 Officer Rank Conversion Chart

  Appendix 4 Terms & Abbreviations

  Notes

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plate Section

  Copyright

  Note on Language

  I have taken a pragmatic approach to German terms. Most specialised organisational terms are given in German to begin with and thereafter in English (Special Task Force for Einsatzgruppe, for example, although there is no ‘Special’ in the term), unless the original has become broadly accepted – ‘Der Führer’ for example. I have referred to SS ranks in German to distinguish them from army ranks.‘Die Wehrmacht’ in English language books has come to signify the German ground forces – strictly speaking Das Heer. After 1935, the term embraced all the armed forces in the Third Reich, including the army, navy and air force. For this reason I refer to the ‘German army’ rather than ‘the Wehrmacht’. I have treated place names on a case-by-case basis.

  Preface

  Riga, 2010

  Imagine Whitehall on a dank, autumn morning. A far-right British political party leader steps towards the Cenotaph, jaw set, dark suited, clutching a wreath.1 Behind him stands the party elite sporting banners displaying back and white photographs of hard-faced men in grey military uniforms. A dense police cordon holds back jeering anti-fascists who have gathered in Parliament Square. He and his followers have come here to commemorate a handful of forgotten anti-communist martyrs who joined the German armed forces and fought against Stalin during the Second World War. After solemnly placing the wreath at the foot of Edwin Lutyen’s chaste memorial to the dead of the Great War, the party leader makes a short, angry speech denouncing the post-war British government for punishing these brave, far-sighted warriors as traitors. History has proved them right! As he finishes, an egg splatters on his immaculate black coat. Then the party men march up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, closely pursued by protestors. Scuffles erupt, banners are trampled underfoot. Tourists and passers-by scratch their heads, puzzled. Who on earth were these ‘heroic’ anti-communists?

  In August 1942, an odious public school dropout called John Amery and his companion Jeannine Barde arrived in Berlin masquerading as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Browne’. Amery was very well connected: his father was Secretary of State for India and his brother, Julian, an illustrious war hero.2 John Amery’s hosts, the ‘England Committee’ at the German Foreign Office, hoped that his defection would provide them with a propaganda coup. They were grossly mistaken. Rebecca West, who witnessed Amery’s post-war trial for High Treason at the Old Bailey, concluded that he ‘was not insane … but his character was like the kind of automobile that will not hold the road’.3 Although his odious personal ideology perfectly fitted the German world view, John Amery was no great catch. His grandmother had been a Hungarian Jew who ha
d found refuge in Britain, but the Amery clan were all diehard conservatives. Given this bigoted cradling, it is not surprising that John became a fervent anti-communist whose views, at least to begin with, mimicked those of his father and brother. But unlike them, he became an outspoken and virulent anti-Semite who was in thrall to the vicious ‘Jew hatred’ of French ultranationalist culture. John Amery spurned his well-to-do family and became a dedicated bohemian. He contracted syphilis at the age of 14 and by the time he arrived in Berlin was an alcoholic bigamist, burdened by massive debts. But Hitler and the German Foreign Office had a crass understanding of English social mores and it took them a long time to understand that John Amery had little to offer the Reich.

  For a year, Amery and Jeannine boozed and rowed in the capital of the Reich, sending their bills to Hitler’s personal office. Amery made a few radio broadcasts and narrowly escaped a manslaughter charge when Jeannine choked to death on her own vomit. Then in January 1943, the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot, who had formed the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (LVF), persuaded the German military authorities to give Amery access to British prisoners of war. Most gave Amery short shrift and he succeeded only in recruiting a tiny band of about thirty-eight turncoats, the majority of whom were former members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). By the end of 1942, Amery’s bizarre antics had exhausted German tolerance and he was effectively sidelined by the England Committee. The baton passed to one Thomas Cooper, a former resident of Chiswick – who was already serving as SS Corporal Thomas Haller Cooper. Cooper had spent time as an SS camp guard in Sachsenhausen and fought on the Eastern Front. In early 1943, he was transferred to a British POW camp at Genshagen where he busily promoted the German cause. In September 1943 Gottlob Berger, the SS head of recruitment, formerly took over Cooper’s band of converts as the Britisches Freikorps (British Free Corps or BFC). At the end of April 1944, SS officer Hans Werner Roepke formally inspected Cooper’s dozen or so men and issued them with SS identification papers and side arms. The SS provided uniforms sporting heraldic leopards and a Union Jack shield.

  The contribution of the BFC to the Reich’s ‘crusade against Bolshevism’ was not even trivial. SS General Felix Steiner reported that ‘they were suffering from an inner conflict … they were depressed’. Steiner refused to use them in combat – and last saw the sorry band shambling westwards along an autobahn. In May 1945 the relics of the BFC surrendered to American troops near Schwerin.4 John Amery, who had inspired German recruitment of British prisoners, fled to Italy, to confer with Mussolini who was by then holed up in the fascist Republic of Salo. When Amery arrived in nearby Como, he was captured by Italian partisans and handed over to British Military Intelligence. In November, Amery was repatriated, tried at the Old Bailey and, on 19 December 1945, hanged in Wandsworth prison. His distinguished father Leo Amery claimed that his son had been ‘inspired by a desire to save the British Empire’. Thomas Cooper, who had served in an SS Death’s Head unit, had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

  Suppose that seventy years after John Amery’s fatal encounter with hangman Albert Pierrepoint, the leader of a far-right British political party proposed commemorating Amery and his ludicrous handful of followers as prescient Cold War warriors, who understood long before most British citizens that ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was a tyrant infinitely more terrible than Adolf Hitler. Did not the crimes of the Soviet Union far outstrip those of Nazi Germany? Amery, this political party claims, was no treasonous villain, but a hero whose execution in a British prison was a travesty of justice. This counterfactual scenario is by no means unimaginable.

  In 2008 many of the far-right parties of Europe backed the Prague Declaration on Conscience and Communism. This was hatched up by Baltic scholars and politicians. Its authors demand that the European Union ‘equally evaluate totalitarian regimes’. In other words, the crimes of the Soviet regime and the Nazi Holocaust should have equivalent moral status. This is often summed up by the slogan ‘red = brown’. The Prague Declaration proposes replacing Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January with a ‘Day of Remembrance’ to be held every 23 August, the day on which the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. This ‘equal evaluation’ may appear seductive. After all, how often does one hear that ‘Stalin was just as bad or worse than Hitler’. But the apparently reasonable claim that ‘there are substantial similarities between Nazism and Communism in terms of their horrific and appalling character and their crimes against humanity’ is not what it seems.5 The authors of the Prague Declaration grossly distort the historical record and seek ultimately to tear down the unique moral status of the Holocaust. The concept of ‘double genocide’ lumps together heinous Soviet practices such as summary execution, deportation, imprisonment and loss of employment with the deliberate and planned attempt to liquidate an entire human group. Soviet crimes should indeed be properly memorialised, but they are not equivalent either in intent or result to the ‘Final Solution’.

  The consequences of rendering the crimes of the Soviet Union equivalent to the German Holocaust are already becoming clear in many Eastern European nations. In the Baltic States, Hungary and Ukraine it is now commonplace to hear politicians imply that wartime collaboration with the Third Reich should no longer be regarded as a moral catastrophe – a stain on the nation. Instead collaboration is increasingly reinterpreted as a pragmatic means to oppose the destructive power of the Soviet Union. This inevitably means that the tens of thousands of men who volunteered to serve the German occupiers as policemen and soldiers can be reinvested as heroic nationalists – no longer vilified as collaborators in genocide. Compelling evidence that this historical lie has begun to take root in Europe can be observed every 16 March in the capital city of Latvia.

  In spring 2010, I travelled to Riga to observe the annual ‘Legion Day’ – a parade by Latvian Second World War veterans. Nothing remarkable about that you might suppose. But you would be wrong; the veterans’ parade I witnessed commemorates the ‘Latvian Legion’ recruited by Heinrich Himmler’s private army, the Waffen-SS, in 1943. Surviving members of this SS Legion mourn their fallen comrades in Riga’s cathedral, the Dom, then march to the ‘Freedom Monument’ that stands in central Riga close to the old town.

  In 2009, the Latvian SS Legion was splashed across the front pages of British newspapers when David Miliband, then British Foreign Secretary, denounced the Conservative Party for forging links with far-right European parties – including the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party that, Miliband alleged, supported the Nazi Waffen-SS. Miliband’s speech provoked an international storm – from both the Conservative Party and the Latvian government. Timothy Garton Ash, the doyen of historians of Eastern Europe, weighed in: ‘How would you describe a British politician who prefers getting acquainted with the finer points of the history of the Waffen-SS in Latvia to maximising British influence with Barack Obama? An idiot? A madman? A nincompoop?’6

  William Hague, now Foreign Secretary, refused to back down. The ‘Latvian Legion’ had nothing to do with the Holocaust, he claimed. The old Legionaries had never been Nazis. Hague went on: ‘David Miliband’s smears are disgraceful and represent a failure of his duty to promote Britain’s interests as Foreign Secretary. He has failed to check his facts. He has just insulted the Latvian Government, most of whose member parties have attended the commemoration of Latvia’s war dead.’ Hague neglected to mention that the ‘Latvian Legion’ refers to two Waffen-SS divisions: the 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS (1st Latvian) and the 19th Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). These war dead sacrificed their lives for Hitler’s Reich – and its ‘war of annihilation’. Now their surviving comrades will commemorate the memory of the legion as national heroes.

  I arrive at Riga airport early on Monday morning. It is bitterly cold and wet; the sky a leaden canopy. Snow is forecast for the follow
ing day, 16 March, when the SS commemoration takes place. When I cross the grand Vanšu tilts, or ‘Shroud Bridge’, an hour or so later, faltering sunshine glitters on the broad expanse of the Daugava River. At first sight, Riga resembles any prosperous modern European city. Its wide boulevards are lined with imposing villas, built by a German elite two centuries ago, and swarm with gleaming Mercedes and BMWs. The skyline of the old city is pierced by spindly brick spires – also built by industrious Lutheran Germans. It is hard to escape the shadow of the Teutonic Knights who conquered the Baltic region in the fourteenth century and whose descendants dominated Riga until the end of the First World War. In one Lutheran church, I notice a wall plaque dedicated to a composer and concert meister, Johans Gotfrids Mitels (1728–88), who is also buried as Johann Gottfried Müthel. But Riga is not a fustian museum city. Although the global recession hit Latvia hard, pushing up unemployment to 23 per cent, many young Latvians conduct themselves like students all over Europe, crowding into busy new internet cafes, American-style coffee bars and McDonald’s. A rather beautiful tree-lined canal flows through the centre of Riga, crossed by the Freedom Boulevard. At the intersection stands the granite-clad Freedom Monument, built in 1935 to honour the soldiers killed fighting for Latvian independence in 1919. It is a potent symbol of nationhood which has withstood three foreign occupations. Next day, on 16 March, the Latvian SS legionaries would march here from the Dom cathedral and lay wreaths to their fallen comrades.

  In 1939, under the secret terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Soviet forces had occupied the Baltic States, instigating a reign of terror and deporting tens of thousands of Latvians. In June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and by early July had driven Stalin’s armies out of the Baltic region. To begin with, many Latvians welcomed German troops as liberators – a pattern repeated elsewhere in the east. But the new masters of Latvia swiftly threw together an occupation regime whose savagery eclipsed the brutality of the Soviets. German administrators amalgamated the three Baltic States into a single entity – the Ostland – effectively abolishing them as sovereign nations. On the heels of the German armies came the Einsatzgruppe – the Special Task Force death squads that unleashed the systematic mass killing of Jewish civilians in a bloody swathe across the Baltic, Belorussia and Ukraine. As these death squads moved north towards Leningrad, the German SD (Sicherheitsdienst), an agency of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, began recruiting fanatical young Latvians as auxiliary policemen and used them to murder Latvian Jews. These so-called Schuma battalions proved horribly effective. By October, at least 35,000 Jews had been murdered. In the summer of 1942, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler authorised recruitment of ‘non-German’ Waffen-SS soldiers in neighbouring Estonia – and extended the net to Latvia at the beginning of 1943. According to the Latvian government, more than 100,000 Latvians ended up serving in the German SS.7 On 16 March 1944, as the Soviet Army drove Hitler’s armies towards the Baltic, the two Latvian SS divisions fought ‘shoulder to shoulder’ against the Russians on the banks of the River Velikaya. It is these allegedly heroic events that are commemorated on Legion Day. A few brigades of the Latvian SS that survived these terrible battles ended up defending Berlin, Hitler’s last ‘Fortress City’. After the destruction of the Reich, the Russians rapidly consolidated their occupation of the three Baltic States and turned them into Soviet socialist republics. As Riga’s Occupation Museum insists, this was the second Soviet occupation – and this time the Russians held the Baltic in an iron grip for nearly half a century. Few Latvians who endured these grim years imagined that the vast Soviet Empire would collapse with such humiliating speed – and that Latvia would once again become an independent nation and part of the European Union.